The Glory to Come

, well, let me invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to Romans chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 for our time of study and the word this morning, For the benefit of any that are visiting with us, we're doing a verse by verse study through Romans 567, and 8. We're calling this a journey to the heart of the gospel, and as we continue in our study of this section of the book of Romans, we come this morning to verse 19. And my goal, this morning will, be to look at verses 19 through 21.

And if you want to give a title to the message, it would be The Glory to come. The glory to come. Paul in these four chapters has been just putting in front of us the glories of the gospel. And what's interesting is Throughout these four chapters, there are times where Paul is pointing in different directions in terms of tense.

There are times where Paul is pointing to the past and he's saying, let me tell you some things that are historically true, that are a part of what makes up the gospel story. And so he tells us things in the past that happened, that Christ died and That he was raised from the dead and he even points to things that happened in our own past. Those of us that are believers in Jesus Christ, he points us to things in our own personal history that we have been saved and in being saved our sins have been forgiven.

We have died to sin, our old man, our old self, our old identity has been crucified.

with Christ, and we have received the Holy Spirit and on and on the list goes of things that are true about us in our own past that are contained inside the Gospel. And then there are times where in these four chapters Paul points his finger at present realities, things that are true, and the present. For those of us that are believers in Jesus, we are, in fact, now in a state of being dead to sin. Our sins are, forgiven, present tense.

We have been justified, which means we Still justified and we stand as righteous before God. In addition to that, we are under grace and God's grace, present tense is always continuously abounding towards us and so we always have this standing in grace, we have the Holy Spirit who dwells inside of us, and on and on the list goes of things that Paul points to that are true of us in the past, and that are true in our present circumstances in Christ. But then there are times, and we see this especially in the second half of Romans chapter 8, where Paul takes his finger, and he points his finger at the future.

And he says, let me tell you some things that will be true.

Of you in your future. And in this section of Romans chapter 8, Paul gives us a number of descriptions, as our tour guide of the afterlife for those of us that have believed in Jesus, and he gives us description after description of things that will be true of us in Christ in our future. And essentially what we have seen is that you could take all those things that are true of us and our future and you can put all of that in a box and then label that box glory. There is glory that is coming, and all that will be true of us in Christ in our future in heaven with Christ can be rightly labeled glory.

We saw two weeks ago that this word glory speaks of that which is substantial, that which is heavy, that which is weighty, that which is impressive. that which is glorious. There is something so impressive and immense and weighty and substantial that is coming our way in Christ that it blows all of our present reality in this life away. And Paul points us to these things, and he's going to teach us in these verses how to think deeply.

In fact, he begins in verse 18 by saying, For I consider, I am thinking. Let me tell you how I think with regard. To the glories to come. I've run the math on this, and here's what I reckon to be true regarding the glories to come, modeling for us that we need to be deep thinkers about the future glories that are coming our way.

I want to submit to you guys this morning that what you believe about the afterlife, whether you're a Christian or not, what you believe about the afterlife shapes you in the present and profound ways. And even beyond what you believe about the afterlife, how much you think about what you believe. About the afterlife and what you think about regarding your afterlife will also give shape to how you live your life. It shapes us profoundly.

We are not just shaped by our past circumstances. We are not just shaped by our present circumstances. We are also shaped profoundly by our view of what awaits us in The afterlife. Richard Wurmbrandt in his book Tortured for Christ tells about his experiences and the experiences of many under Russian and Romanian communism and just very moving accounts of the torture that he and other believers in Jesus experienced at the hands of, of the communist.

tortures. And as you read through that book, you, you, it becomes very evident that the different characters in this book are being shaped profoundly by their view of the afterlife. Let me just give you two examples here, two extremes. He says in one place in the book, the communist tortures often said there is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil.

We can do what we wish. See, they're not just shaped by their past and present. Their behavior is being shaped by their view of the hereafter. He says, I heard one torturer say, I thank God in whom I don't believe that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.

And he expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners. There is really nothing more debasing and dehumanizing than a belief in absolutely no afterlife. It reduces one to the status of a mere animal. Who can behave as he or she pleases, as an animal does in the wild.

On the other extreme, you see many examples in the book Tortured for Christ of believers who had a profoundly, a profound view of what awaited them in glory, and they were shaped by that. Their attitudes, their perspectives were wonderfully shaped by the glory to come. He tells this account of one girl who was a Christian girl. He says one of the workers in the underground church was a young girl.

The communist police discovered that she secretly spread gospels and taught children about Christ. They decided to arrest her, but to make the arrest as agonizing and painful as they could, they decided to delay her arrest a few weeks until the day she was to be married. On her wedding day, the girl was dressed as a bride, the most wonderful, joyous day in a girl's life. Suddenly, the door burst open and the secret police rushed in.

When the bride saw the secret police, she held out her arms toward them to be handcuffed. They roughly put the manacles on her wrist. She looked toward her beloved, then kissed the chains and said, I thank my heavenly bridegroom for this jewel he has presented to me on my marriage day. I thank him.

I am worthy to suffer for him. She was dragged off with weeping Christians and a weeping bridegroom left behind. They were weeping, he says, because they knew what happens to young Christian girls in the hands of communist guards. Her bridegroom faithfully waited for her.

After 5 years, she was released, a destroyed, broken woman, looking 30 years older. She said it was the least she could do for Christ. Such beautiful Christians are in the underground church. What if that was your daughter?

What if that was you? On your wedding day. Such beautiful Christians, he says, are in the underground church. What is it that makes someone like this so beautiful?

Yes, it's her past in Christ. It's what Christ has done. It's her present in Christ. But a part of what adorned and beautified this Christian girl was the heavenly glory that awaited her.

She says, I thank my heavenly bridegroom. What she's saying is there is a heaven. And there is Jesus Christ there, and he is my bridegroom, and I, along with all my brothers and sisters, will be married to him one day, and these chains are jewels in preparation for that day. Communist torturers believed there was no afterlife.

This beautiful young Christian girl believed that there was and had very specific beliefs about the glory to come and it shaped her, and it beautified her. And so guys, we need to think deeply about the future. John Piper says shallow thinking makes for shallow souls, shallow thinking makes for shallow Christians and And we do well to be deep thinkers on the glory to come. Now we've already been looking at this passage beginning in verse 18 and following.

What we're going to do today is look at 4 more descriptions of the glory that is coming to us who are children of God. first of all, just a real quick review. We, we learned two weeks ago of some descriptions of this glory beginning in verse 18. We learned that this glory that is coming to us is a glory that will be revealed literally into us.

We'll not just behold it outside of ourselves, but it will be so powerful, it will pierce into us. It will transform us and be manifested in and out from us. A second thing we learned is that this glory that is coming to us is even now near to us. We should not think of it as far away in time, but it is always near, as it were, a few feet away, just behind the curtain, ready to burst in.

At any moment and when the day comes that that our bodies are raised from the earth and we are fully glorified in a spiritual and physical existence in glory with Christ in heaven, when we enter into the fullness of the experience of that glory, we will not only observe that glory then, but we will then look back and realize how near that glory was to us all along. Another thing we learned two weeks ago is that this glory is infinitely greater than the sufferings of this present time.

The glory that awaits us is substantive. It is immense, and it is heavy, so heavy, Paul says in verse 18, that our present experiences in this life, including our suffering, are not worthy to be compared to the weightiness.

And the density of the glory that we will experience with Christ in heaven. I'm sharing with the men at the Man Forum two weeks ago that, a lot of times when we think of heaven, we tend to think of maybe the colors white and yellow or gold, and we think of people floating in the air and see through like things are not, they don't have a lot of substance to them. But the teaching of the New Testament is that there is a substance and a density to reality and glory that will make all of life in this world but a featherweight in comparison.

This feels solid to me, right, but this will feel like a featherweight in terms of its substance compared to the density of what we will encounter in heaven.

CS Lewis in his book The Great Divorce tries to capture this and And I'm not at all, there's some theological concerns with with his belief. With the doctrine of hell, and I'm not advocating for all of that. the book itself is a fantasy, and he said, please don't try to derive my beliefs regarding the afterlife from this fantasy, but it's a dream sequence where he imagines that people are in hell and they're able to get on a bus and take a bus tour to heaven. And so people load up on the bus, that's how the story begins, and they're transported not so much to heaven, but just to the foothills of heaven.

But when they get there, it chronicles the experience of the different tourists on the bus. Ultimately, just about every one of them who just get to the foothills of heaven, they end up not wanting to stay. They prefer to go back to hell. Where they came from, and part of what they don't like is as they try to walk on the grass, it hurts their feet.

The grass is so dense, even a leaf is so heavy that they cannot even pick it up off the ground. There's a waterfall, and they try to stay as far away from the waterfall because just one drop of water from that waterfall would destroy them. It is so dense. And I like the fact that he tries to convey heaven in that book as something that is very, very dense.

Hell, he says, is about the size of, it's, it's smaller than the size of an atom. It's an incredibly small place because people who live lives of self-absorption are so reduced to such smallness that they can fit. In a space that's small, and they lack the density and substantiveness that those who are in heaven possess and so this world feels solid to us guys, but this is a featherweight in comparison to the density of life that we will know in. glory, and that includes our suffering.

Our sufferings weigh so heavily upon us. The burdens that we carry from day to day weigh so heavily upon us. The things that we pray for and ask God, Take this away from me. This hurts.

This weighs heavily. Upon me this is crushing me, God. There have been times I've gone through difficult circumstances and I felt like someone was taking my heart and just squeezing it. It weighed so heavily upon me and Paul doesn't want to minimize the heaviness of our suffering.

But he also doesn't want to minimize the heaviness of the glory to come, and he's saying, I'm telling you, and you can even think this way now, he says in verse 18, that the sufferings of this present time, and all of our experiences in this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be ours in heaven. And then there's a final thing we learned two weeks ago regarding this glory, and that is it is a glory that involves our revelation as sons of God, as God is not ashamed to call us His children, His sons, and as we are revealed in the fullness of glory as it exudes forth.

From us. Well, where we left off two weeks ago is where we're going to start today as we look at some more descriptions of this glory, and that is number 1, that this glory is a glory that creation itself is eagerly waiting to see in us.

This glory is a glory that creation itself is eagerly waiting to see in us, he says in verse 19. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. Now we had to rush through this a couple weeks ago, so let me take a little bit of time with this. The word that is translated anxious longing is three words jammed together into one word.

It's the word from attached to the word head. Attached to the verb watch. And to put all of that together, the idea is it means to watch with the head away from the body, and the way that this is graphically portrayed by some writers is it speaks of stretching the neck and craning forward. When someone really wants to see something, they stand on their tiptoes, they're leaning forward, craning their necks in order to get the best possible glimpse.

Of something and it conveys not only eagerness to see but also a desire to see everything that can be seen. JB Phillips in his paraphrase says all of creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. Guys, that's a glorious thought. When we become students of creation, we are blown away by creation, right?

You study the sun and the moon and the stars, and it's staggering the more that you learn about these monsters that course through the heavens. And yet Paul says that these very entities, as it were, are on their tiptoes and craning their necks, and they can't wait to see what you're going to look like in glory. We have an interesting relationship, we believers with creation. In some ways, creation makes us feel small and we're blown away by the glory of it.

But then special revelation in scripture says, no, no, you are the pinnacle of the glory of God revealed in creation. In Psalm 8, The psalmist says, When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you've ordained, I'm left asking myself the question, What is man that you take thought of him and the Son of Man that you care for him? Lord, when I, when I look at the heavens and I see the immensity and the glory of the heavens, I end up feeling so small, and I'm left asking, what is man that you would even take thought of him and the Son of Man, me, he says that you would even care for me.

I'm less than an ant.

In your natural creation. And yet even though beholding the glories of creation leads him to ask this question, meaning it's a legitimate way to process creation to where we're left feeling small, he then look what he does, his train of thought does not end there. Verse 5 yet. Yet what I've just said is true.

It's a legitimate question to ask. It's a legitimate response to creation. Yet you have made him, and he's talking about himself and all of mankind. You have made him a little lower than God, and you crown him with glory and majesty, and you make Him rule over the works.

Of your hands. In Scripture, God gives us a very highly exalted view of ourselves. God's glory is revealed throughout all of creation, the sun and the moon and the stars, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, display the glory of God. There is a glory of the sun, there is a glory of the moon, there is another glory of the stars, and they declare the glory of God.

And yet, the Bible also teaches that mankind is the pinnacle of the display of God's glory. We are the ones who bear the image of God and God uniquely in a way he has not any other part of his creation, crowned us with glory. And with majesty and appoints us to rule over all of the works of God's hands as his co-regents. We were just up in Mammoth last week and Seeing the majesty and the beauty of the mountains, you cannot help but be struck by the power and the glory of God, and you cannot help but feel small.

And yet God, if he could speak, would say there's more of my glory in you than there is in all of the material universe combined. And if you then add to that thought that all of creation, you're admiring all of that, and then you listen in on Paul as Paul says, actually creation is staring at you and it's amazed and it is craning its neck. It can't wait to see what you look like in your fully glorified state. In your fully glorified state, there will be more of God's glory in your little pinky than there is in all of the created universe combined, and creation anxiously awaits.

We learn in First Peter chapter one that even the angels of heaven stoop low to look in. To these things they're blown away, and they anxiously await what we are going to look like when we are revealed in glory. You look at how the gospel exalts us. And then you look at proud man's efforts to exalt himself, and man in his pride could never dream of anything so high.

As what God has designed for those who humble themselves and let Him exalt them. If you will humble yourself before God and allow Him to exalt you, He will exalt you far higher and far more majestic ways than you could ever dream of exalting yourself in. There's a second description that we can observe in these verses regarding the glory to come and that is that this glory that awaits us is a glory that will entail or involve our freedom from subjection to futility. It will entail, it will involve our freedom from subjection to futility.

Look at what he says in Romans 8:20. He says, for the creation was subjected to futility. Not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope. Verse 21, in order that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

All I want to focus on here with this point is that last line that you see on the screen, the freedom of the glory of the children of God. When we enter into our glory, as we're talking with each other and fellowshipping with each other, one of the words that we're going to use to describe our experience in glory is the word freedom. This is liberation amongst other things in the afterlife with Christ we will experience a freedom and a liberation that is beyond the freedom and the liberation that we are experiencing even now.

Paul has already told us in Romans 6 that we are free from enslavement to sin.

We see him affirming that we are free, but we're not totally free yet. The question that this begs is if in glory we will experience the freedom of the glory of the children of God, liberation of the glory of the children of God, then what is it that we will be liberated from? And there are two key words that Paul uses in verse 20 and 21 that identify what it is that we will be liberated or freed from. And it's the word futility and corruption.

In glory, we will experience an eternal freedom. From futility and an eternal enjoyment of freedom from corruption, this particular point, however, we're just focusing on the fact that the glory that is coming to us will entail our freedom from subjection to futility. Now let me say a few things about the word futility. the Greek word that is translated futility here is actually if you were reading the Greek translation of the Old Testament and the Greek Septuagint, and you were reading the Greek translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

you, you'll read, you remember where it says like in chapter 1, verse 2, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. the word vanity that shows up again and again and again in the book of Ecclesiastes, that Greek word, Is the Greek word Paul uses here. One writer says, if you want to know what Paul means, By futility here in Romans 8:20. If you want a commentary on that word, read the book of Ecclesiastes, and you will learn all you wanted to know, and more than you wanted to know about this futility or vanity that all of creation is subjected to.

The book begins, Vanity of vanities, and in case you missed it, he says it again, vanity. vanities, all is vanity. We're not going to run through the whole book. Let me just highlight a couple of things though.

Solomon says that he experimented with pleasure. But he says, behold, this too was vanity. He set about to experimenting with wine and intoxication, and he bought houses for himself, built gardens for himself, parks for himself for recreation. purposes and slaves.

In other words, anything at all that I didn't want to do, I had slaves to do that for me. Imagine having a life like that where you never ever have to do anything that you don't want to do. There are people there to just do whatever it is that you want them to do that you don't want to do. He also amassed incredible wealth more than anyone before him silver and gold.

And also entertainments. And musicians, any entertainments he ever wanted, he had those. Solomon says anything my eyes wanted, I did not withhold myself. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, anything at all that I ever wanted.

So imagine living that life where anything you ever want. At whatever point you want it, you get it. Anything you ever don't want to do, there are people to do that for you and who live at your beck and call from morning until evening to do your bidding. He also pursued sexual pleasure.

He said, I had many concubines which are not tractors. These are women in addition to the 300 wives that he had who existed solely for the purpose of satisfying his every sexual whim at whatever point he wanted that satisfied. And after achieving and accumulating all of that and gorging himself on all of this, he says, behold, all was vanity and striving after the wind. He says in Ecclesiastes 3 that God has put eternity in man's heart, and part of what that means is God has put inside our beings, inside of our hearts, an eternity-sized whole.

And nothing in this life, no relationship, no money, no gardens, no, no women, no wine, no pleasure. Nothing can fill that eternity sized hole. After seeing all that was vanity, he said, Well, I think I'll, I'll try wisdom. And so he pursued wisdom, but then he got to thinking, what, there's a wise man, there's the fool, they both die.

So one fate befalls them both. This too is vanity. And so he began to despair of even the wisdom. That he gained, he became so frustrated and depressed.

He says in Ecclesiastes 2:17, I hated life. In the next verse, I hated all the fruit of my labor, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me. All this stuff that I have gathered for myself. I'm getting older and I'm going to die and someone else is going to get this that I have accumulated for myself.

So I hated life and I hated all that I possessed. He then began to look around and observe evil in a fallen world, and he said, I observe those who are oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them, and I observed those who oppressed them, and the oppressors had no one to comfort them either. And then he said, So I congratulated the dead who are already dead, more than the living who are still living. You're really depressed when you're doing this thing.

And then he says, but better off than both of them is the one who never existed in the first place, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun. That's the low place that Solomon went to. The dead are better off than the living, and those who never existed. I envy those who were never born and who never existed in the first place.

He observes so much evil in the world and he comes to this conclusion. He says in Ecclesiastes 7:29, he says, Behold, I have found only this that God made man upright. Right, but they have sought out many devices. I do believe this.

There is a God, he says, I believe that God created man. I have no trouble with that. And I believe that he made man to be upright. But I also observed that man, including myself, we have rebelled against God, and we have sought out many devices and the Hebrew word translated devices, there is the word that means engines of warfare.

God made man upright. And we have rebelled against him, and we have sought out and we have constructed our own engines of warfare against this God who created us. And the world is full of this fallenness and evil, and I see it everywhere I turn, Solomon says, and that's why he says vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Paul, in Romans 8:20 says the creation, and we're included in that was subjected.

To futility. This is what we experience in a fallen and a broken world that raises the question, what about for us who are believers, do we experience anything of this futility? And vanity, I think if we're really honest with ourselves, we would say we still experience vanity and aspects of this futility that creation has been subjected to and we're included in that. As believers in Jesus, we've already seen in Romans 7 that we still experience the presence of indwelling sin, right?

We still have within us a flesh that, according to Galatians 5 wages war against the spirit. It wages war against God. We've not only sought out engines of warfare to rebel against God, there are engines of warfare against God inside of our members. that have been set up and established.

And as, as the Puritans would say, God, I love you, but I often strike you with my hand. That's futility, that's vanity that we experience in this life, even as believers. We experience frustration sometimes in our desire to do what's right. And Romans 7, Paul says, the good I want to do, I don't do the evil I hate.

I do. That's a confession of someone who had believed in Jesus as his Lord and Savior, James and James 3:1 says, we all stumble in many ways. Every stumbling. That we ever experience in our thoughts and in our words and in our deeds in our attitudes is an experience of vanity and futility.

We look around us, there is evil all around us. We are often impacted by the injustice, the evils that are done. We suffer as a result of that. Sometimes we labor to, to correct evils that are done in our society, and sometimes we fail in that, that's futility.

Sometimes we succeed in that. That's great. But then a year later, it gets undone. Living in a fallen world is an experience of very significant aspects of vanity and futility.

But what, guys, when we are in glory when we're doing our journal entries and recording and chronicling our experiences, none of us will ever write vanity of vanities, all is vanity. We will write things like fullness of fullness. All is fullness. We will live in absolute freedom.

From futility and vanity. There will be absolutely no presence of indwelling sin inside of us. There will be absolutely no engine of warfare. Inside of us desiring to strike out against God, we will never experience the least frustration in our desire to please God and do what is right and serve Him.

We will serve Him without any limitation. Now we wish we could do so much more in glory. There will be no frustration. At all, there will be no evil around us to combat.

We will never be frustrated in our efforts to bring about righteousness in the world or in the glory to come. We will never suffer. There will be no tears, no dying, and no death and no suffering in any way. We will experience in glory absolute and total unmitigated freedom from vanity and futility.

There's a 3rd description of the glory to come, and I suspect this is as far as we're going to get this morning. We'll leave the 4th 1 for next week, and that is that it is a glory that will involve our freedom from slavery to corruption, to corruption. In glory we will experience liberation for all of eternity from a thing that Paul calls corruption. He says the creation itself will be set free from its slavery to corruption, and we'll talk about that next week, the liberation creation experiences, but it will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

In other words, Creation will merely enter into our freedom, the freedom that we are enjoying from corruption and from futility. will experience total freedom from corruption in the life to come. What is the word corruption? It is basically this.

Here's a succinct definition of what Paul means by corruption. It is that unending cycle in which conception, birth, and growth are relentlessly followed by decline, decay, death, and decomposition. You ever seen that? We see it everywhere.

We see it in ourselves. It is that frustrating, unending, depressing cycle. In which there is conception, there is birth and great celebration at one's birth, and then there are years of vitality and growth and stature and in strength, but that is always relentlessly followed by decline and decay and death and decomposition. We experience this.

It's called death. In Romans 5:12, Paul says, just as through one man, sin entered into the world and death through sin. Through the choice that Adam and Eve made, sin came into the world, and along with sin came this thing called death. Adam and Eve began to die on the day that they partook of the forbidden fruit, and death has been passed from them.

To all of us who are their descendants. And so we all experience the ravages of what Paul calls corruption, this relentless cycle. of conception, birth and growth and strength and vitality followed by decline and decay and death and decomposition. What we politely call aging is Paul would say it's dying.

It's a slow dying. It is corruption. It is this relentless cycle. Where we die day by day.

It is us experiencing diminished abilities and capacities. and in the past, I've named the age at which this occurs when it began to occur for me, but I'm not going to do that because it depressed some people. in the past, I said 28 years old, but I won't say that this time. but, but we all looking at our lives, we were born, we've grown in stature and in vitality, but then there's a point, at whatever point, and it's different for everybody, where the decline begins, the decay begins, the dying process begins, and as We've said often from this pulpit, none of us are waiting for death to pay us a visit.

It shows up every day and is killing us one cell at a time. And those of us that are old enough to be experiencing that in a way that's actually visible, we see that. And we're not waiting for death. And as we experience this corruption in a fallen world, there is weakness that we experience and sickness and vulnerability to disease and the actual getting of diseases and experiencing the ravages of those diseases.

This is all a part of this thing that Paul would label corruption. What makes it even more painful is that those that we love, the family and the friends that we love, We watched them. Being gripped by this cycle of conception and birth and growth followed by decline, decay, death, and decomposition. No one can resist this.

People can create the illusion of postponing it by a few months or years, and someone who may be 50 can do a pretty good job of making themselves look 45, but they can't make themselves look 18. We are all dying and marching to the grave. We experience corruption and those that we love are experiencing that. And honestly, even more than me experiencing this corruption, What's more painful to me is seeing those that I love experience that and knowing that they will not always be with me in this life.

I've noticed that at times my signs of aging bother my children. there was a Where's my cell phone? not too long ago, I don't even have it with me, but, I didn't have my glasses with me that I now need at the age of 47, and I was trying to read my phone and I was squinting my eyes so that I could read it and I had it like this close, and my kids, it really unsettled them. They were like, Dad, and I was like, what?

And they, they didn't even know how to finish the thought. It was just distressing to them. Because what that is, is that it's a reminder to them that dad is dying. And it's only going to get worse.

This is corruption. We have a dog. A boxer at her house that, is now beginning to show radical signs of aging and her back feet are slipping on the tile, and we took her to the vet two weeks ago and they gave her some anti-inflammatory medications. So, she's now on anti-inflammatories to help her with the arthritis and, And it's honestly, it's just a dog, but it, it hurts to see an animal that, that you care about experiencing this cycle of corruption.

Conception, birth, growth, and so much celebration, vitality followed by decline, decay, death, and decomposition. This is corruption. We experience this. But what, guys, in glory.

In glory, we will experience an absolute and total unmitigated liberation from even the slightest whisper of corruption. There will be no aging. There will never be diminished abilities and capacities. We will never experience weakness.

We will never experience sickness. We will never experience disease. And any sickness, weakness, disease that we experience in this life will be all fully and totally rectified in glory. And those that we love, whatever disease, affliction, sickness, weakness that they experience here will be completely rectified in glory.

And we will live in an eternal existence experiencing no corruption in ourselves. And those whom we love will never experience the ravages of corruption. It's not that we'll simply live longer, we will live forever. And we won't just live forever, we will live forever in utter vitality.

There will be utter vitality, utter strength, we will go from strength to strength, and from glory to glory, and experience total freedom from futility, and from corruption. We need to stop here. But guys, listen, think about the life to come. Don't get so caught up in some of you are staring at your past.

And you won't let go of things in your past that maybe have shaped you in some ways, and you carry wounds to this day. Some of us, we spend so much time staring at our present. Some of us spend a lot of time staring and worrying about our future five years from now in this world. Some of us spend a lot of time worrying about the corruption that we experience and how can we mitigate that in some way or postpone that in some way and how many hours can I spend at the gym.

Nothing wrong with going to the gym, but how much time do we spend putting this corruption at bay? Compared to how much time do we spend looking at and thinking about and celebrating the glory to come when for all of eternity, we will experience total absolute freedom from corruption and from futility. Let us think on these things and thus be shaped by them. Let me ask you to bow your heads this morning.

If you're here today and like you've never You don't consider yourself a Christian, but maybe you've got questions. Listen, I'd love to talk to you afterwards. If you've got any questions, call me up, come by the church office, come talk to me after the service. It'd be an honor and a blessing to just help answer your questions, but this is just a small sliver.

This is just a sliver of the fullness of the glories that are coming to us who have believed in Jesus. God would say, quit trying to exalt yourself, put your pride down, and humble yourself and let me be the one who exalts you because I can do so much better job than you could ever dream of doing. Let's pray together. God, help us as your people to be shaped by eternity.

To look at the things that are not seen. Which are eternal and to not be so obsessed with the things that are seen that we don't see what is not seen. There is a glory coming, Lord, that will make this look like a fog in terms of its weightiness. Our sufferings will have the weight of a fog that's just so light and suspended in air.

It's heavy, Lord. Our suffering is heavy, but it's, it's light compared to the density and the substantiveness of the glory to come. May we live with this glory before our face, and may we begin to be shaped by it now.